I Wrote A Story, And Now It's An Audio Production: "Shadow Transit"!

(NOTE: Based on time elapsed since the posting of this entry, the BS-o-meter calculates this is 7.236% likely to be something that Ferrett now regrets.)

One of my most frequently asked questions is, “I love your blog posts, where can I read your stories?” As it turns out, they’re all over the damn Internets. But today, horror podcast Pseudopod has done an audio production of my story Shadow Transit, my tribute to Lovecraft-as-filtered-through-Stephen-King-as-filtered-through-me, and Marie Brennan has done a bang-up job as the childish voice of Lizzie, the seven-year-old-girl who is now a soldier to fight extralinguistic horrors.
This story was directly inspired by my complete inability to play with small children. Here’s your taste:

Last night’s blizzard had choked the roads, leaving the cabinet factory short-handed for the Friday shift. So Michelle’s boss had called to give her a choice: she could come in for an emergency shift today and keep her job, or she could keep the day off she’d requested to visit her daughter at Shadow Transit, in which case she’d get her ass fired.
“Thank you,” Michelle whispered, glad beyond belief. “I’ll come in. Just…call them for me? Please? I’ll give you the number; they won’t listen to me. Make sure they tell Elizabeth that Mommy’s sorry.”
Jackson made his apologies, saying how he was sure Lizzie was needed wherever she was, but he had quotas to meet. Michelle barely heard him. She felt the giddy relief of a kid hearing that school was cancelled. Her boss had made the choice for her; she didn’t have to play with Lizzie this month and pretend that everything was okay. No three-hour drive out to the Colander. No watching teenaged guards struggling to remember how to pronounce English words. No worrying about what Lizzie had meant for days afterwards. She was free for another month and hated herself only a little for it…

From there, it’s a slow burn to total meltdown. The podcast is live now, and it’s one of my favorite stories to perform because the climax is largely dialogue. I have fun reading it, when I do – and Marie did a fine job with it. Go listen.